Our Father

Intro

If you had to describe your prayer life in one word, what would it be? Think about that for a moment. Choose one word to describe your prayer life. Be honest.

Distracted?

Inconsistent?

Aimless?

Duty?

Hard?

Lacking?

Oooof?

Non-existent?

Maybe some of you would say enjoyable, vibrant, or fruitful. But for the rest of us mere mortals, prayer is often a struggle.

And with that struggle comes feelings of guilt, frustration, and discouragement because we know we should be praying more - however much that is, and better - whatever that means, which then leads to less prayer. So the cycle continues, and our prayer life sputters.

In Acts we see that the early church was devoted to prayer. Paul says in Romans 12:12 that we are to “be constant in prayer” and in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 “pray without ceasing.” In church history we see saints like Martin Luther say, “I have so much to do today that I shall spend the first 3 hours in prayer.” And we’re like, “Man I can hardly make it to 3 minutes without falling asleep or my mind wandering to the to-do list.” And so we get discouraged.

In the center of the Sermon on the Mount, as Jesus is instructing us in the ways of the Kingdom, he says “When you pray…pray like this…” NOT “if you pray…” He expects the lives of His Kingdom citizens to be marked by prayer. More guilt.

So before we get to the pattern for prayer that Jesus lays out for us in what is often called “the Lord’s prayer,” I want to spend some time today looking at our problem with prayer, and then challenge us to correct our posture in prayer, so that the one word used describe our prayer lives would change to reflect what Jesus desires for us.

Let’s jump into it…

Our Problem with Prayer

“7 “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.”

Problem 1: We think we need to perform for God

Last week we saw that it is easy for us to make prayer a performance before men in order to earn their praise. This is our first problem with prayer, and it impacts our prayer lives not only when we are the ones doing the performing, but also when we have seen good performances.

[Illustration - roller skate guy] Roller-skating is new to my kids since moving back here. They have enjoyed going to roller rinks and doing laps to inappropriate music. At roller rinks, there is always that one guy. He might have a ponytail, not always. But that guy can skate. Forward, backs, shifty legs, spins. Dude is in the zone on the hardwood floor. Imagine though, if my kids saw him, Michael Jackson on wheels, and just gave up. They saw his moves, knew that was impossible to do, dropped their skates and left.

When we hear other people pray, even if it is genuine and not for the praise of men, in our immaturity we can think “Man, she is super holy. She’s dropping some big theological words in there and even some King James stuff. I can’t pray like that.” And we give up. We drop our roller skates and leave.

Behind that is the problem that we think we need to perform for God. We need to show Him that we know our stuff. God is clearly impressed by long prayers and big words in a version of English that hasn’t been common since the 1700’s. I’m not good at that. I’m not articulate. I fumble my words. I’m not that smart. So we give up. Or, we need to clean up our lives, get our act together, stop sinning so much, and then God will approve of our performance and be ready to hear our prayers.

Problem 1: We think we need to perform for God.

Problem 2: We think we need to manipulate God

[Illustration - Elijah/Baal] In 1 Kings 18, during a severe drought in Israel, the prophet Elijah challenged King Ahab and the prophets of Baal to a contest on Mount Carmel. They would each prepare a bull for sacrifice, and the true God would send fire from heaven to consume it.

The prophets of Baal were the first to go, and they called upon the name of Baal from morning until noon, saying, “O Baal, answer us!” But there was no voice, and no one answered. And they limped around the altar that they had made.”

Seeing this, Elijah mocks them, saying “cry louder, for he is a god! Maybe he is daydreaming, or away on a trip, or going to the bathroom, or is asleep and needs to be woken up.” So the prophets do some more rituals, cutting themselves, crying louder until evening. And yet, the author records, “but there was no voice. No one answered; no one paid attention.

Elijah then took his turn, rebuilding an altar to the Lord that had fallen into disrepair, and dousing it with water. He prayed, and fire descended from heaven, consuming the sacrifice, the soaked altar, and the surrounding water.

Jesus says to not be like the Gentiles who “heap up empty phrases thinking that they will be heard for their many words.” Maybe you don’t cry out all day and do ceremonial cutting like the prophets of Baal. Maybe you don’t use a bunch of empty phrases, going on babbling, in order to be heard for your many words like the Gentiles, but the root of feeling like we need to manipulate God bears fruit in our lives in other ways.

“God, if I do this, then will you do that?”

“If I spend more time in your word, then will you bless me.

“If I fast more often, then will you give me the answer about my future that I am looking for?”

God I am following your rules, therefore you owe me a better marriage, or a successful business, or the exact answer to my prayer that I am asking for.

When we make prayer some sort of mechanical formula of if A then B, we try to manipulate God like the prophets of Baal and like the Gentiles. And, we will give up, because then it is just ritual and not relationship.

Problem 2: We think we need to manipulate God.

Problem 3: We think that God doesn’t care

“8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

[Illustration: bells, Anu, love?] In India people would do rituals to wake their gods up each morning. I don’t know if their deities actually work up from the ringing of bells, but I know we sure did. It was loud.

And it was sad. Each ring was a desperate cry looking for peace. One of our friends was deep into Hinduism, pursuing a degree focused on the goddesses. She said that when we read about Jesus and the God of the Bible, she had never, in all her studies, heard of a God actually loving us. Actually caring for us. Her gods needed to be woken up. They needed to be coerced into action. They didn’t care, they just needed to be appeased.

Jesus says “don’t be like them.” Meaning, you will be tempted to think that God doesn’t care about you, that He needs to be coerced into action, that he is normally inattentive and focused elsewhere.

The Serpent’s lie from the garden sneaks into your psyche and says “God is withholding something from you. He doesn’t care about you. He’s not paying attention to your needs.”

Earthly Fathers?

What makes it harder is that this lie may have been reinforced by your earthly father. Abuse. Neglect. Disinterest. The very real pains that many of you experienced from your fathers makes believing that God actually loves you, actually cares about you, actually has an interest in you, that he “knows what you need before you ask him” because He is actually paying attention to you, really hard to believe.

I just want to acknowledge that and say that God is not afraid of your pain or your wounds. He’s not ashamed to be called your Father. And I hope that the horrible example you experienced leads you to run to your heavenly Father and see a contrast in care, affection, and love that those who didn’t have a horrible dad will never know. He is not ashamed to be called your Father.

And even if you weren’t abused or neglected, no one in here had a perfect dad. He was selfish at times. He ignored you occasionally. He checked out every now and then. And those are real wounds too that we project on God. That the enemy picks up on and uses to lead us to doubt God’s goodness, His attention, His care.

Problem 3: We think that God doesn’t care

Problem 4: We don’t see our need

“8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

[Illustration: Molly - independent] My daughter Molly is a tough, independent girl who likes to figure things out on her own. We’ll often hear her grunting and getting mad in another room as she tries to rip open a bag of cereal or accomplish some task on her own. We regularly have to say to her, “Molly, you need to ask for help.” Finally, she’ll give up and ask us for help.

She just had her tonsils and adenoids removed, and tubes put in and she is miserable. Poor girl is in a lot of pain and just looks sad all the time. But she is asking for help a lot. She realizes how weak she is, how much pain she is in, and it has led her to tell us right away what she needs.

In America, land of plenty, home of cost-co, we so often don’t see our need. We live in abundance, surrounded by comfort, expecting things to be easy. Dulled to our need, we find it hard to pray and ask for help.

Jesus encourages us that our Father knows what we need before we ask him, but so often we don’t ask because we don’t feel our need, we don’t see our dependence on God, we sing “Lord I need you, O I need you, every once in awhile when my Kroger online order is running late I really need you.”

And so our fourth problem is that we don’t see our need.

Each of these contribute to the discouraging, inconsistent, aimless, lacking, fill in the blank prayer lives that many of us have. My first challenge to you all is to ask the Holy Spirit to search you and reveal the ways these problems manifest in your lives.

How are you performing for God?

Are you trying to manipulate Him?

How have you bought into the lie that God doesn’t care about you?

In what ways have you become dull to your need for Him?

There are surely more reasons why we struggle in prayer, but I think at least these are revealed in today’s passage. So Jesus reveals some of our problems with prayer, and then He offers us as a corrective, a better posture in prayer.

Our Posture in Prayer

He says, “9 Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven”

Father Repeated

As I said earlier, this is the center of the Sermon on the Mount. Up to this point we’ve heard a lot of teaching on the Kingdom of Heaven, and how we as citizens are to be inside-out, from the heart, whole-person disciples of Jesus.

By positioning this long section on prayer at the center of His sermon, Jesus is emphasizing the necessity and importance of prayer in the lives of His people. He says in John 15:5 that apart from Him we can do nothing. So lives of inside-out conformity to the will and character of God, righteous lives, depend on Jesus, and that dependency is expressed through prayer.

But there is something else that stands out from this middle section of the sermon, and that is the high concentration of Jesus referring to God as your Father. Starting in 5:48 and going to verse 18 of chapter 6, “your Father” is repeated 10x and our father here in verse 9 makes 11x. He repeats this eleven times! Circle or highlight those in your Bible because Jesus doesn’t want us to miss this.

[Illustration: Jared visa surprise?] I got a message the other day from my friend who received a 5 year visa for him and his family to go back to India. You hear that, and it’s like, cool, that’s good for him. I heard that, and I sent him the best happy dancing gif I could find. India doesn’t just hand out long visas like that, especially nowadays. I was shocked.

We are not surprised by this because it is common language for us, but the original audience would have been shocked to hear this.

God in the OT

In the Old Testament, God revealed Himself as the holy, holy, holy sovereign Creator whose covenant name is Yahweh, the great I AM. The name Yahweh was so pure to Israel that they feared repeating it lest they break the commandment to not take His name in vain. JI Packer says, “Though Yahweh was his covenant name, it spoke to Israel of what their God was in himself rather than of what he would be in relation to them.”

The self-existent God’s holiness, greatness, majesty, and purity…this was the main focus for Israel, and while the concept of God as Father is not completely absent from the Old Testament (one example is Isaiah 63:16), it definitely was not common to refer to God in such terms.

And yet here is Jesus repeating it over and over and over again for His new covenant people to hear. This should surprise us. Why?

Not everyone has God as their Father

He is speaking to citizens of the Kingdom, those who have responded to the call to repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and decided to follow Jesus.

“10 By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.” (1 John 3:10, ESV)

There are two groups: children of God, and children of the devil.

By nature and by choice, men are born separate from God. If we don’t grasp that, then we are not going to appreciate the beauty of our adoption into God’ family through Jesus.

Only those who trust in Jesus are adopted into God’s family

It is only through the atoning death of Jesus that we are brought into the family of God, and given all the rights of heirs.

“12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12–13)

[Explain] - to become

“…In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.” (Ephesians 1:4–6)

[explain] - through Jesus Christ…to the praise of his glorious grace

We are tempted to believe otherwise

In Matthew chapter 3, during Jesus’ baptism, the father declares over the Son, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

The very next chapter, Jesus is led out into the wilderness to be tested. There, when he is tried and hungry, the Devil comes and what does he say, “If you are the son of God…”

He challenges Jesus’ identity as the son of God, right after it had been confirmed.

And he does the same to us. He wants us to view ourselves as orphans without a Father. He wants us to live like we don’t have a loving, caring Father who loves to meet our needs.

He knows that if we lose sight of who we are, then we won’t come to Him in prayer, prayer that is powerful against the schemes of the Devil. He knows if we forget our identity as children, we will wander aimlessly, trying to find meaning in the world outside of our relationship with God as our Father.

So Jesus says it again and again. Your heavenly father, Your father. Your father!

John says, “1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” (1 John 3:1)

SEE! Don’t forget! Remind yourself. Remind one another.

He gives us His Spirit to remind us!

“14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” (Romans 8:14–17)

His Spirit testifies to our doubting spirits that we are children. We can cry out to our Father, Abba, this word that was used for daddy’s. The word that Molly cries out from her room right now at night because she is hurting: Dadda! And I come running. That is the kind of access we have. And the Spirit reminds us because we so easily forget. And then we don’t pray.

Jesus repeats it, and calls us to have this posture in prayer.

It is our privilege to come to the Father as children in prayer

So that becomes our posture in prayer.

We come needy

We come messy

We come weary

Come sleepy!

We come weak

We come expectant

We come often

So we come as children to our Father: intimacy. And we come as children to our Father in heaven: awe, wonder, reverence, respect.

Intimacy and awe: This gives us Confidence: He is Good and He is Powerful

Conclusion

So, revisit your one word description of your prayer life. Think through the problems that lead to prayerlessness in your life. See the privilege and invitation of your heavenly father to come to Him in prayer.

My hope for myself, and for you all, is that in the coming days, which lead to weeks, and months, and years, is that the one word to describe our prayer lives would be: childlike.

Imagine a church marked by childlike dependency on the Father in prayer!

Breath prayer - Abba, Father, I belong to you.

Communion:

Mephibosheth - forgiven, and brought into the family (2 Samuel 9)